As I have posted previously in this forum, my own DNA came out West African. I had my nephew tested for verification, and his came out the same. Because our family oral history says Johnson is Swedish, I did some research and found that there were small colonies of free blacks among the early Swedish settlers in New Jersey and Delaware. However, the closest matches to my DNA (11/12) were from the Senegal-Dahomey region, a rice growing area. Slaves from that area generally went to the Carolinas, where rice was grown (I have read that the technique of rice growing was actually learned from the Africans.) I have also read that it takes six to eight generations for the African ancestry to "wash out" so that none of the offspring will show any traces. Prior to that, even though the person may look white, a child of that person could revert back to dark skin. We always seem to think in terms of slavery, but not all blacks were slaves. The early blacks in Virginia were treated as indentured servants and released after a term of service; at least one of them became a landowner and imported white indentured servants. There was class prejudice but not yet race prejudice, and intermarriage between white and blacks of the servant class was common until, little by little, it was outlawed. There are still black families in areas of Virginia whose ancestors were never slaves. Those of us who test African may well descend from such a marriage rather than a union of a slave and a white woman. And there were a few blacks in England. My own research turned up an entry in the St. Dunstan parish registers for 1608, the year Richard and Isabella Pace were married there, this entry: "Sam and Mary, Negers". I learned later that Sam and Mary might have been married at sea and the marriage simply recorded there, but it shows that there is a lot we don't know about the human history of this time. An interesting story: The first Europeans to sail the African coast were the Portuguese. In the Congo region they found a large kingdom (twice the size of Portugal) with a king and sub-chiefs, a sort of feudal system, with well ordered roads and markets based on cowrie shell money. A few Portuguese nobles settled there and married the daughters of kings or chiefs due to their class prejudice--color was no problem but a noble didn't marry a commoner. The Portuguese set up a slave trading operation offshore on an island and offered guns for slaves. The sub chiefs began slave raiding each other to get the guns. The King tried to stop the slave trade but failed. As a result, the kingdom broke up and the roads and markets declined. In the 19th century, when the King of Belgium took over the area as his private province, some of the blacks there claimed to be Portuguese nobles. They were laughed at, the presumption being that they were just imitating whites. The probability exists that they were correct. If any of their descendents live there today, DNA could help substantiate that claim. There's a lot that we don't know about history. I taught history all my life, and I always emphasized to my students--history is NOT the past. History is what we THINK the past was like. Roy Johnson -----Original Message----- From: JRA [mailto:janie_reb_aingeal@yahoo.com] Sent: Wednesday, December 07, 2005 11:55 PM To: PACE-L@rootsweb.com Subject: [PACE-L] Re: [] RE-D. N. A. ????? An interesting side-note. The baby could look completely white itself. I have a friend whose Mom has a black Dad & white Mom. Mrs. Johnson's (my friends Mom) brother & sister look as white as I do with no black features at all, Mrs. Johnson looks as black as her Dad with black features. Sincerely, Lena Atpowelljr@aol.com wrote: ROY JOHNSON & Other Cousins, This is in Answer to; D. N. A. Not being able too prove Descendent from a Specific Ancestor. I have gotten INFO from A Member of TWO of MY Caucasian Families Recently, THAT they did a D. N. A. test, Going Back to Parent B, All OK, BUT; At Ancestor B. WOAH! ??? Parent Showed WEST African_____??. NOW HOW; It is a foregone conclusion, Proven Fact that there was Cohabitation between White men & Slave women. THE Potential results,___? Here Could be that there was a Connection between a White Woman & A Slave Male__?? YEP who knows. WE come up with Two Cases of Caucasian Tracing back to WEST African D. N. A. JUST____? Suppose that there was a Connection of White Female & West African Male, Resulting in the Birth of a MULATTO Male & the Family Decided to KEEP & raise the Baby & He Marries White or a Female Mulatto & that union produces a Male I do not know how many Generations that it would take for an Off spring to come along that would not show any Trace. I know of a woman whose Grand Mother was Full blooded Cherokee, One of the Grt Grand Sons has Features, His Sisters Daughter has more than a little Native American Resemblance. The Daughter Born to Daniel's While he was gone for TWO years, C-O-U-L-D a D. N. A. Match Where My theory COULD hold water also but not BY D. N. A. past Ancestor B. CUZ A T ==== PACE Mailing List ==== To share info which may be of interest to others, reply to the mail list (PACE-L@rootsweb.com). To say thank you or otherwise reply personally, reply to sender. --------------------------------- Yahoo! Shopping Find Great Deals on Holiday Gifts at Yahoo! Shopping ==== PACE Mailing List ==== To subscribe or unsubscribe send email to PACE-L-request@rootsweb.com with the one word message: subscribe OR unsubscribe For digest mode, use PACE-D-request@rootsweb.com

Remembering that the Y-chromosome can pass virutally unchanged from father to son for many generations (hundreds or thousands of years), I don't think that you need to limit your speculations to events here in the Americas after colonization. Spain was controlled by the Moors for centuries and that was just one of the many ways that an West African Y might have spread amongst the European population. European populations have been "mixed" for a very long time. In other words, your blonde, blue-eyed Swedish ancestor might have already had the West African Y when he immigrated, and his ancestors back in Sweden may have had it for many generations. My point is that we need not presume any illicit master/slave relations nor any other emotionally charged scenario to explain an unexpected West African Y chromosome. Besides, aren't the human population geneticists using mitochrondrial evidence to conclude that we are all descended from folks who came out of Africa some 100-150,000 years ago? If this is true, then we all have African DNA, and the only question left to ask is how long ago our most recent African ancestor left there for other parts of the world. Joe Anderson